Engaging Citizens Through Play

The Challenge - Design the human-machine interaction and messaging of the CitiSketch kiosk.

The Outcome - An interactive touchscreen that informs citizens of the tradeoffs based on the land use planning of their city.

The Black Arcs has created a digital simulation tool to replicate changes in city patterns as land-use and infrastructure are altered. The benefit of this simulation is twofold; to help land-planners show the trade offs required when designing a city, and to allow citizens to play around with their city to test their ideas.

When it came time to show the simulation to the citizens of Sackville, New Brunswick, The Black Arcs hired GoDo to design the interaction the users would experience when using the touchscreen kiosk. The objective was to design an experience that any citizen within the community would be comfortable participating in.

Understanding the different needs from a wide variety of users allowed GoDo to create an accessible user experience.

Observing how market-goers reacted to the images on screen and how they approached the kiosk gave us many clues to how to design the interaction to be approachable.